There’s a particular kind of panic that shows up whenever a new technology touches learning. Calculators were going to ruin math. Spell-check was going to ruin writing. Search engines were going to ruin memory. Now it’s AI’s turn.
Underneath that panic is usually one real fear: that leaning on something outside yourself will stop you from ever standing on your own. That help, if you take too much of it, becomes a substitute for growth instead of a path toward it.
It’s a fair fear. But I think it rests on a misunderstanding of how independence actually gets built.
We already made this peace, quietly, elsewhere
If you want proof that we don’t actually fear outside help in general, look at the places we’ve already accepted it without much of a fight. Nobody thinks less of a memoir for having a ghostwriter behind it, or of a novelist for working with an editor who reshaped half the manuscript. Plenty of hit songs credit a co-writer or producer who built the hook, and we don’t strike the artist’s name for it. Surgical teams run through checklists before an operation instead of trusting memory alone, and we call that rigor, not weakness. Pilots fly with autopilot engaged for most of a commercial flight, and we still call the pilot skilled — skilled enough, in fact, to know exactly when to take control back. An architect leans on a structural engineer’s calculations, and the building is still theirs.
Notice what all of those have in common: the help was in service of a product — a book, a song, a flight, a building. We’ve made peace with distributing labor behind a product for a long time. The anxiety around AI shows up somewhere different — not around products, but around the person. Nobody worries a ghostwritten memoir will make the celebrity a worse thinker. Plenty of people worry an AI-assisted essay will make the student a worse one.
That difference is worth sitting with, because it tells you the fear was never really about outside help. It’s about outside help touching the parts of us still under construction. Which means the real question isn’t whether to lean on something outside yourself — you already do, constantly, and always have. The question is what that leaning is doing to you while it’s happening.
Two kinds of leaning
Go back to the ghostwriter and the editor for a second, because the difference between them is exactly the distinction that matters here. A ghostwriter produces the words for you — hand over the story, get back a finished product, and your own writing ability is right where it started. An editor does something else: hands your draft back with questions and cuts, and if you actually engage with those notes, you come out sharper than you went in. Both are outside help. Only one of them builds something in you.
That’s the line I want to draw around how you use AI while you’re learning. Ask it to write the essay, and you’ve hired a ghostwriter. Ask it to poke holes in your argument, or explain why the first draft wasn’t landing, or quiz you until an idea actually sticks, and you’ve hired an editor. The tool doesn’t decide which one it is. You do — by what you ask of it, and by whether you let it leave anything behind in you.
I made a version of this case in the book, in the girder I called Resources — that asking for help is a strategic move, not a failure of independence. I meant that mostly about office hours and tutoring, human resources you could see and thank. AI complicates it, because the help is instant, tireless, and endlessly patient in a way no mentor can be. That makes it easy to lean on constantly, without ever noticing you’ve stopped leaning on anyone human at all.
The part that actually worries me
Here’s what I think is genuinely new, and genuinely worth your attention: it’s not just whether AI strengthens or replaces your own thinking. It’s whether it quietly starts replacing the people around you.
Think about the last time you solved a real problem — not a homework problem, an actual one. Did you reason it out alone? Or did you text a friend, sit with a mentor’s old advice still shaping how you approached it, argue it out with someone until the answer got clearer for both of you? Most real thinking has always happened in the company of other people. That’s not a weakness in how we learn — it’s the whole design. The study group, the office hour, the late-night conversation that reframes a problem you’d been stuck on for days: those aren’t inefficiencies to be optimized away. They’re where a lot of the actual growth happens, and where the sense of shared struggle happens too.
AI is available at 2am when your friend is asleep and your professor’s office hours are days away. That’s genuinely useful. But it’s also exactly why it needs to be used on purpose. If asking AI becomes the default instead of the last resort, you’re not just changing how you get an answer — you’re slowly trading a human relationship for a frictionless one, and frictionless isn’t always better. The friction in asking a real person is often where the trust, the accountability, and the sense of not being alone in this actually come from.
Intentionality is the whole point
So here’s where I land, and it’s simpler than it might sound: use AI in a way that strengthens your connections — to your own growing capability, and to the people around you — instead of quietly substituting for either one.
Before you open the chat window, it’s worth asking two questions instead of one. Not just is this making me more capable, or just finishing the job for me — but also, is this the moment to reach for a machine, or is this actually a moment to reach for a person? Sometimes the honest answer is the machine — it’s faster, it’s patient, it doesn’t judge a question that feels too basic to ask out loud. But sometimes the honest answer is that you’re avoiding the harder, slower, more human option because it’s easier not to.
That’s the intentionality I’d ask you to bring into this new era of learning. Not fear of a tool, and not uncritical trust in it either — just enough awareness, each time you reach for it, to know which kind of leaning you’re actually doing, and who or what you might be leaning away from in the process.